The openCost project: Integrating publication cost data into institutional repositories

The project's main goal is to promote standardized collecting of publication cost data in order to improve the transparency of costs within institutions and also enable inter-institutional cost comparisons. This kind of data includes publication-related fees like APCs or submission fees, but also costs from transformative OA agreements or memberships. The basic idea is to integrate this kind of financial data directly into repositories on record level, making it accessible together with the existing bibliographic metadata. For this purpose, a metadata schema was developed to comprehensively store and exchange the data. In the first part of our talk we present this XML schema and show how the partner institutions utilize it to enrich their repositories with publication cost data. Via OAI-PMH these publication expenses are currently harvested directly by OpenAPC, a service located at the Bielefeld University Library, which collects and disseminates data sets on fees paid for open access publishing under an open database license. The second part of the presentation introduces this harvesting process and presents first results.